The Haxe project was started on 22 October 2005 by French developer Nicolas Cannasse as a successor to the popular open-source ActionScript 2 compiler MTASC (Motion-Twin Action Script Compiler) and the in-house MTypes language, which experimented with the application of type inference to an object-oriented language. Nicolas' long-time passion for programming language design and the rise of new opportunities to mix different technologies as part of his game developer work at Motion-Twin, led to the creation of a whole new language.
Being spelled haXe back then, its beta version was released in February 2006 with the first supported targets being AVM-bytecode and Nicolas' own Neko virtual machine.
Nicolas Cannasse, who remains leader of the Haxe project to this date, continued to develop Haxe with a clear vision, leading to the Haxe 1.0 release in May 2006. This first major release came with support for JavaScript code generation and already had some of the features that define Haxe today, such as type inference and structural sub-typing.
Haxe 1 saw several minor releases over the course of two years, adding the Flash AVM2 target along with the haxelib-tool in August 2006 and the ActionScript 3 target in March 2007. During this period there was a strong focus on improving stability, which resulted in several minor bug-fix releases.
Haxe 2.0 was released in July 2008 and included the PHP target, courtesy of Franco Ponticelli. A similar effort by Hugh Sanderson lead to the addition of the C++ target in July 2009 with the Haxe 2.04 release.
Just as with Haxe 1, what followed were several months of stability releases. In January 2011, Haxe 2.07 was released with the support of macros. Around that time, Bruno Garcia joined the team as maintainer of the JavaScript target, which saw vast improvements in the subsequent 2.08 and 2.09 releases.
After the release of 2.09, Simon Krajewski joined the team and work towards Haxe 3 began. Furthermore, Cauê Waneck's Java and C# targets found their way into the Haxe builds. It was then decided to make one final Haxe 2 release, which happened in July 2012 with the release of Haxe 2.10.
In late 2012, the Haxe 3 switch was flipped and the Haxe Compiler team, now backed by the newly established Haxe Foundation, focused on this next major version. Haxe 3 was subsequently released in May 2013.